On Fri, Jun 30, 2000 at 10:47:41AM -0500, Paul J Thompson wrote:
> 1. I feel that we need to provide a way for releases to occur more
> frequently.
http://ftp-master.debian.org/~ajt/
There'll be more information forthcoming in a week or so.
> 2. We REALLY DO need to start being a little friendlier to our would-be
> Debian fans. Right now, we spend for too much time telling people we
> don't want them to package stuff because we don't think they will do a
> good enough job.
Nononononono! We *definitely* want people to package things, but we just
want them to do it via Debian proper. We wouldn't have the sponsorship
program happening if we didn't want lotsa newbies packaging things.
> No, they won't be Debian perfect, but hey, that's life.
If they're not perfect, but they are worthwhile, bug reports can be filed,
and other people can do NMUs to fix them if necessary. It's much easier
to do this within Debian than outside of it.
> The "Radical" Suggestion
> ------------------------
> What if we were to chop Main up into a series of smaller sections. These
> sections (3-8 of them) would be independantly released. Yes, it would be
> much harder to coordinate them so that they work well together. However,
> I think this is worth a thought.
This could work, perhaps. It's not really clear how the coordination
problems could be solved though: if one section freezes for two months
and then releases, but has to stay frozen for another two months while
another section freezes and then releases, and then both of those have
to stay frozen for a further two months while another releases, that's
not much better than currently.
I *believe* that the aforementioned testing infrastructure should solve
most of the release problems we're currently having, though. For values of
"believe" approaching "hope", maybe, but even so.
> Alongside this could (and I believe, should) fit a plan to allow other
> groups to maintain collections of Debian packages. There could be a
> Debian-Helixcode section which contained (yep) the Debian Helixcode
> packages. These would not be officially "sanctioned" by Debian. However,
> we would attempt to cooperate with these groups as a matter of providing
> the best distribution for our users that is possible.
We do that anyway. What these separate groups (like debian-jp before
them, and like ipv6 and helix currently) should be doing is merging their
changes into Debian, so we can ensure they're all properly integrated
and widely available and so on.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``We reject: kings, presidents, and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and working code.''
-- Dave Clark